Colonel Kenneth Hollard was still mulling over the conversation when he walked into his quarters and heard a whine. He looked down. The wicker basket was overset and the hound puppy nowhere in sight. Until he looked in his footlocker, slightly open.

"Hell," he said, looking down. "Oh, well, I didn't like that belt anyway, or those slippers. Come here, you damned set of teeth and paws."

He clamped the puppy firmly in his arms, avoiding most of the attempts to lick his face, and took it back to the office. The beast was from the royal hunting pack's kennels; nobles here kept hunting animals, despite the general Babylonian dislike of dogs.

Of course, the king isn't a Babylonian, strictly speaking, he thought.

The royal family and a lot of the nobility here were Kassites who'd come down from the mountains during the breakup of Hammurabi's empire centuries before and seized power. They'd been pretty well assimilated by now, but they kept up some contact with the old homeland; Prince Kashtiliash had been fostered there for a couple of years, for instance.

"C'mon, pooch," he muttered to it, and the puppy went into wiggling ecstasy at the attention. "Got a nice girl I'd like to set you up with."

"That makes no sense!" Raupasha daughter of Shuttarna said.

The physician's apprentice Azzu-ena sighed. "I agree," she said, tapping the paper on the table between them. "But it is the way the Nantukhtar language is."

Raupasha looked down. She'd learned the alphabet quickly; it was childishly simple compared to the Akkadian cuneiform. The language it was designed to write was another matter. Azzu-ena knew more of it than she; of course, she was a learned woman, and old-perhaps even thirty. It was good to have her come and help with the studies; it made the house less of a silent prison. And it gave her someone to complain to when the irritation grew too much to bear.

"But the form of the words is exactly the same!" the Mitannian girl said. "House dog and dog house. Shouldn't it be dog's house, with that possessive ending?"

Azzu-ena frowned herself, scratching her big hooked nose. "You would think so… but in the English, most of the time, it is the order of the words that determines their meaning, not the declension and inflection as it is in Akkadian. Is it so in Hurrian?"

"Yes, and any other language I've ever heard of," Raupasha said. She sighed, and her lips firmed with determination. "I will learn this tongue! Quickly!"

"Why are you in such a hurry?" Azzu-ena asked. "I have been, because the knowledge I seek is in this tongue. Why do you drive yourself so?"

"Because…" Raupasha hesitated. But there is no reason she should not know. And it was good to have someone to talk to. "Because I must understand them, too. I would not always be their client and pensioner, well though they have treated me."

The maid padded in with a tray of the small round sweet cakes and a pot of cocoa. Cookies, she reminded herself. Or biscuits. Cocoa had a flavor like nothing on earth, soft and rich and dark and sweet all at once; she found herself craving it often and restrained herself sternly. She was not going to disgrace her blood before these strangers.

"And to have someone to talk to," she went on aloud. "You are not here at Ur Base all of the time, and the house slaves are so stupid!"

"Not stupid-they're peasants and far from home and ignorant," Azzu-ena corrected her, a smile taking any sting out of her words. "And please! Do not call them slaves. They are employees who receive a wage. The Eagle People hate the very word 'slave'; they are strange in that manner."

"They are strange in all manners," Raupasha said, pouring a little date syrup into the cups of cocoa and stirring them with a whisk. "So many weird taboos and laws of ritual purity-the way all excrement must be carried away out of sight, for instance, and all rubbish buried or burned, and even laborers made to wash every day as if for a ritual in a House of Exclusion."

"They have reason for that; they think that filth causes disease, and they may well be right. Likewise their hatred of insects."

"Oh!" Raupasha said. "Still, they are very strange indeed. I asked Lord Kenn'et the other day what his rank was in Nan-tuck-et, and he said he was a citizen. What means this word?"

"I am not sure," Azzu-ena said thoughtfully. "I think it means something like an awelum, a free man of a city."

"But he said something about the citizens choosing the king," Raupasha said. "Surely that means high nobles, generals, ministers, chief priests?"

"I haven't asked much of how they are governed," Azzu-ena said.

"Though of course you would, coming of a high family." She looked around. "And so they treat you, I see."

Raupasha nodded. The house here in the Nantukhtar base was smaller than her foster father's manor, but more comfortable than anything she had ever known. There were no frescoes on the walls, but there were framed pictures unbelievably lifelike, and windows of glass clear as solid air. Those were open now, and slatted screens of woven reed let in air without the glare of the afternoon sun. The tile floors were covered in fine rugs, for the Nantukhtar put them on the floor, rather than hanging them on the walls-an extravagance that gave her a guilty pleasure every time her toes worked into them. The furniture was beautifully made, much of it Babylonian-and that of the finest. And there was a kitchen and a bitrimki, a bathhouse, as fine as those of a king's palace in a great city like Nineveh or Dur-Kurigalzu.

"That is partly the lord Arnstein and his lady," Raupasha said shrewdly. "They think I may be of some use to them… I do not know what. If my family were still rulers, they might seek to make an advantageous marriage-alliance through me, but I have neither gold nor power to bring. Isn't it so odd that Lord Arnstein's wife is also his right-hand man… ah, you know what I mean!"

"Yes." A smile, turning the homely face of the female physician almost comely for an instant. "That is a strange custom to which I have no objection at all. Nor do you object that you are treated as suits your birth, rather than your wealth!"

Raupasha nodded. "But part of it is Lord Kenn'et, I think. He is an odd man-a great warrior, a slaughterer of Assyrians, yet his heart is moved to compassion, as if I were his kin." She scowled slightly. "As if I were a small child of his own kin, sometimes."

"That is the way of the Eagle People," Azzu-ena replied. "It is… contradictory. Their weapons slay like the hand of the plague-gods, and then they bind up the wounds of those they threw down." She paused and smiled slyly. "I have seen Lord Kenn'et only a few times. As you say, a great warrior… a man of great beauty, too. Tall as a palm tree and ruddy, strong and sturdy."

"Yes." Raupasha flushed, then coughed. "There is a thing I would ask you, Lady Azzu-ena."

"Ask." The Babylonian's face changed from happy gossiper to the impersonal attentiveness of a professional.

"I am troubled by my dreams. You are a person of learning, and I thought perhaps…"

"I am sorry, I am a physician, not a baru-diviner," Azzu-ena said sympathetically. "I can recommend a good one."

"No… it is not that my dreams are an omen, I think. It is only… I awaken, and before I am fully awake I see again the faces of my foster father and foster mother. They are smiling, and I am a child again and happy, but then… they change. I do not know why they should trouble me; their blood is avenged! Yet sometimes I fear to sleep because of it."

"That is perhaps an omen, or a fate laid on you…"

A knock came at the door. The maid went to it and then opened it quickly, falling to her knees.

"Don't do that," Colonel Kenneth Hollard snapped. The maid bounced up again, flustered. "Hello, Princess. Ms. Azzu-ena. May I come in?"